A Critical Analysis Of English Classroom Discourse In Junior High School

In the formal education, classroom discourse is an important media forknowledge transfer, knowledge acquisition, knowledge building. It plays an importantrole in guiding classroom organization, especially in students’ language acquisition. Itis a broad concept, including teacher talk, student talk, teacher-student interactivediscourse, and even gossip in the classroom. In the areas of classroom discourseresearch many scholars at home and abroad have carried out a lot of empiricalresearches to classroom discourse, such as Sinclair&Coulthard(1975), Ellis(1994),zhao Xiaohong(1998), Zhou Xing and Zhou Yun(2002), Hu Qingqiu(2007). Howevertheir research is mainly limited to the traditional classroom which gives priority toteacher’s lecturing. Their conclusion is that traditional foreign language classroomdoes not provide students with more opportunities to communicate in target languageand lacks a truly communication. And these studies focus on college Englishclassroom discourse.In2001, the Ministry of Education published National Curriculum Standards,which clearly states:“in basic educational stage, the overall goal of the Englishcurriculum is training student’s comprehensive language application ability”. It callsfor the study model of experiencing, practicing, participating, communicating andcooperating and stresses developing students’ language competence, thinking skillsand the ability to exchange and cooperation in the process of using English to dothings. It can be seen that the new curriculum reform requires the students to havemore time and opportunities to communication in the target language and to improvethe comprehensive application ability of the target language through using more meaningful language. Then after several years of implementing the new curriculumreform, it is time to investigate the characteristics of the current English classroomdiscourse in middle school.Five English classroom discourse in a local middle school was analyzed bothquantitatively and qualitatively within the theoretical framework of critical discourseanalysis. In the context of implementation of the new curriculum reform for about tenyears, this thesis aims to explore the reality of the English classroom in a local juniorhigh school and to see whether English teaching meets the requirements of newcurriculum reform. Meanwhile the current thesis also, from a macro perspective, triesto discuss the social factors contributing to such classroom discourse.